Environmental Sustainability and Participatory Approaches: the Case of Italy

A big challenge of the new millennium consists of activating a large mobilization of society toward concrete, efficient and efficacy actions which promote awareness of the problems and their solutions for a sustainable environment. In order to address the different environmental issues existing today in Italy, besides correct and transparent communication, it is also needed the involvement of local communities. The greater problem is how to inform the public. Starting from an analysis of different kinds of participatory approaches, the paper proposes a classification of methods and techniques in four different typologies: participation by feedback, participation by consultation, participation by negotiating and participation by online interaction. Moreover, in depth interviews have been carried out to interdisciplinary experts to evaluate which participatory approaches are the best to use in Italy in terms of participation and cost-effectiveness, to identify constraints that limit the implementation of the different approaches and to provide solutions to overcome them.